best language for 3D manipulation over web ?

[TGOS]

[Rewritten and shortened because of top-posting]

On Fri, 1 Jun 2001 09:13:16 +0200, "Thomas Hansen"
<thomas.hansenNOSPAMORILLSUEYOURASS at entermatch.com> wrote:

> "Jacqueline L. Spiegel" <jackie at popmail.med.nyu.edu> wrote:
>
>> Hi All,
>>
>> I will be writing a program that needs to be accessible over the web that
>> will seek to manipulate objects in three dimensions through the access of
>> an oracle database. 

> www.wildtangent.com
> Down the Game Driver, start hitting your favourite *JavaScript*!! editor,
> off you go...
> 
> Thomas
> 
> PS!
> It's an ActiveX object,

Ergo it won't work in my browser, nor in any other browser except IE.

> wraps around DirectX to make scripting 3D games
> possible.

Ergo it won't work on any plattforms except Windows.

We are talking about Java here, not C++ and the main advantage of Java is
plattform indepency. Why destroying that if it's not necessary?

There's Java3D available for quite some time now. It's a plattform independend
Java plug-in that makes use of OpenGL for displaying 3D animations with
hardware support. It's support for nearly all propagated PC plattforms which
can also support OpenGL (in case of Windows, there are even two versions: one
version running on top of OpenGL and one running on top of Direct3D; I'd choose
the OpenGL version, because if you have a GeForce or Rendeon graphics adapter,
you'll have a lot better performance thanks to hardware T&L).

> I've seen it with a "need for speed" kind of game and it really works (on a
> PII 300mHz, ATI RAGE PRO 8MB)
 
I've seen that too and it even works without hardware acceleration.
http://www.minatrix.com/burningmetal2.html

But with Java3D you'll also have texture filtering and real shading.
http://java.sun.com/products/java-media/3D/index.html

Plattform support:
Solaris (Sparc), Windows (x86), Linux (x86), HP-UX, AIX, SGI Irix

-- 
TGOS